11 "Healthy" Foods That Are Worse for You Than a McDonald's Cheeseburger

The holidays may be the most wonderful time of the year, but with great presents come great responsibility — or something like that, anyway. The point is, with all the running around looking for presents, it's hard to find time to cook, but if you find yourself eating out often, you might want to check out these 11 foods that are actually worse for you than a McDonald's cheeseburger. Sure, they might sound healthy with all their claims to be "grilled" or "low-fat," but as the FDA-mandated calorie counts start showing up in restaurants everywhere, we're quickly learning that those can be mere empty words. Empty like my stomach is going to be next time I go to the movies, because, oh, my God, did you know that there are over 1,600 calories in a medium popcorn?McDonald's has a pretty terrible reputation for selling questionably edible food — show me one person who eats there for the taste and not how cheap the menu is — but its cheeseburgers are actually only 290 calories. With that in mind, Vox created a helpful chart converting your favorite "healthy" restaurant foods into McDonald's cheeseburgers. The aforementioned popcorn is equivalent to five and a half cheeseburgers, but it's far from the worst food you can get. That dubious honor goes to the Cheesecake Factory's Fish and Chips at a whopping 1,980 calories, which is almost seven cheeseburgers. Admittedly, if I were trying to eat healthy, fish and chips wouldn't be my first choice, but no single entree should contain as many calories as you're supposed to eat over the course of a day.

Even healthier-sounding options are secretly betraying you, like the Whole Foods BBQ Tofu Salad, which has 650 calories a serving, or TGIFriday's Pecan Crusted Chicken Salad, which contains more than 1,000 calories. I'm going to stop listing them now because it's depressing me, but be sure to check out the graph below, via Vox. I'll just be over in the corner desperately worrying what else in my life will turn out to be a lie.